2 Comments

DaveJanuary 24, 2005

I’m getting more and more jaded on this issue; it seems that the commonsense view is not going to prevail on this one, however much the “little people” kick up a fuss. We simply cannot make enough impact financially on the politicians to make a difference. So what if 10,000 people all tell their MEP that this is a bad idea? Which MEP is actually going to listen to that when confronted with companies the size of Microsoft – who appear to have persauded one MEP to vote for the software patents, see link below.

SW Patents are a bad thing, and any software author doesn’t want them. However, it seems that all of the UK’s MEPs on the JURI (both of them!) are not voting against the proposal.
Sadly the best we can hope for is a Conservative MP – whose party line is that SW patents are actually a good idea) who on some occasions doesn’t quite vote the way the party expects.
The full MEP list (the UK is at the bottom of the document) is here:http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/docs/050124guide.pdf
which is linked out of the article, but I thought was worth pointing out explicitly.

It’s probably because I feel the same way that things like this make me smile a little more. It does worry me that Poland will find itself in trouble soon, as other countries are ‘pursuaded’ to make life hard for them.